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Catalogue Essay - Colour And Line

Foreword

Our Modern experience belies a series of idiosyncrasies and neuroses that cut deeper than any experienced before. The average individual becomes disenfranchised, detached: separated. At our worst we are seen as narcissistic, indulgent, flagrant… liberal at best. We have become bogged down by the so-called “word fatigue” inspired by and resounding from the current political climate as many a mantra is oft repeated without an ounce of sincerity giving apathy its current and most beguiling form and the arising problem of communication between lines of thought. It is in this epoch when art is at its most needed to lead us out of this particular desert.

I am concerned with false definitions and most especially the results of fractured associations of words.

Words can become not the form into which experience is shaped but a series of meaningless sounds. They can lose meaning before they even pass to paper.
The use of such things as endnotes, footnotes and brackets and the very horror of grammar temper expression and give a potential get out clause from meaning. But then I could never take in all the good surrounding me (I have always taken signs too literally).

Art can stand-alone punctuated only by colour and line.

A selection of works pitted against the boundaries of only these constraints allows for the broadest scope though within form colour and line could become statements of intent.

Why is the new so very important? Why the significance of an artistic conscience? We root ourselves because we are scared of formlessness and chaos. We stutter in black and white, living half-lives, loving by half: when passion rises we draw that line in our own sanity and plead for hues less subtle.

This line of thought is wrong.

The freedom contained within Art can rise above the vacuity of everyday life and fall into the core of the soul, then make its excuses and leave. So goes with the awareness of this the consciousness of every fold of form anchored by a boundless responsibility to punctuate art’s glass wall of inaccessibility.

We are seen as strong only if we stand alone yet nothing springs without community. Perhaps men are islands. Perhaps artists should provide symbiosis for the creeping tide. Perhaps. Perhaps is not good enough if you have ever been certain of anything then join in.

So here is an outcry to the most unfashionable amongst us to step out of the grey: committed, certain, and passionate. Appreciate the manic apparition within us all like true love and light Dance Dance Dancing to everyone’s tune. Or even just the loner winking in humility and quite rapture.

What comes to be important in any kind of reception is the dissolution of the self and to let art reach its highest point art illustrating the redundancy of words.

This is my last word.


Robert Milner